SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
equal justice initiative
South Carolina Execution 'Assembly Line' Rolls On With Killing of Richard Moore
"The state is motivated to kill condemned people as quickly as possible, and they do that despite evidence that might change their minds," said one anti-death penalty campaigner.
Nov 01, 2024
Despite pleas from his sentencing judge, jurors in his trial, and the former head of the state Department of Corrections, South Carolina executed Richard Moore by lethal injection Friday evening after Republican Gov. Henry McMaster and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in the latest in a series of state-sanctioned killings.
The Charleston Post and Courierreported that Moore was pronounced dead at 6:24 pm local time, 21 minutes after the lethal injection was administered.
"Tonight, the state of South Carolina needlessly took the life of Richard Moore—a loving father and grandfather, a loyal friend, and a devoted follower of Christ," the criminal justice reform group Justice 360 said in a statement. "He was not a danger to anyone, and the state eliminated a glowing example of reform and rehabilitation."
Moore, 59, was convicted of the 1999 murder of convenience store clerk James Mahoney. Moore—who was unarmed when he entered the store—argued that he shot Mahoney in self-defense after the clerk pulled out a gun during an argument over correct change. An all-white jury found Moore guilty of murder and armed robbery.
"This is definitely part of my life I wish I could change. I took a life. I took someone's life. I broke the family of the deceased," Moore said in a video accompanying his clemency petition. "I pray for the forgiveness of that particular family."
Death penalty opponents said Moore's case underscores capital punishment's literally fatal flaws.
"Richard Moore's case, like those of so many others on death row, was tainted with racial bias, including as the two prospective Black jurors were peremptorily dismissed, resulting in an all-white jury," Amnesty International USA researcher Justin Mazzola said in a statement after the execution.
"In addition to the racial bias, the crime that Moore committed was not premeditated, which raised serious concerns as to whether it rose to the level for which the death penalty is reserved in U.S. constitutional law," Mazzola added. "It's shameful that racial bias and lack of premeditation were not enough to convince Gov. McMaster to grant clemency to Richard Moore. Gov. McMaster could have used his clemency power instead of overseeing yet another execution in his state."
Moore was initially forced to choose whether he would be killed by electric chair or firing squad following the 2021 passage by South Carolina's Republican-led Legislature of a new capital punishment law amid a shortage of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital. Moore chose the firing squad.
In 2022, the South Carolina Supreme Court temporarily stayed Moore's execution. He subsequently changed his choice of execution method after the state restocked pentobarbital.
Advocates for Moore pointed to his flawless prison behavior and mentorship to other inmates. Among those urging clemency for Moore were Retired Circuit Court Judge Gary Clary, who sentenced Moore to die.
"Over the years I have studied the case of each person who resides on death row in South Carolina," Clary wrote to McMaster on Tuesday. "Richard Bernard Moore's case is unique, and after years of thought and reflection, I humbly ask that you grant executive clemency to Mr. Moore as an act of grace and mercy."
Jon Ozmint, director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) from 2003 to 2011, wrote, that that Moore "has proven himself to be a reliable, consistent force for good on death row."
However, McMaster informed SCDC Director Bryan Stirling Friday that he had "carefully reviewed and thoroughly considered" Moore's application and "declined to grant executive clemency in this matter."
Moore is the second person executed in South Carolina since it resumed executions. In September, the state killed 46-year-old Freddie Owens. Four more South Carolina death row inmates have exhausted their appeals. They are likely to be executed in the coming months.
"It's like an assembly line," Paul Bowers of the ACLU of South Carolina toldThe Guardian. "The state is motivated to kill condemned people as quickly as possible, and they do that despite evidence that might change their minds."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Every DA... Should Follow Suit': Prosecutor Seeks to Commute County Death Sentences
District Attorney Jeff Rosen "is taking an important step to confront racism in the criminal legal system," said Smart Justice California.
Apr 04, 2024
In a potential model for other U.S. officials, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, "once a prosecutor who believed in capital punishment and one who rejects association with the progressive prosecutor movement, has been quietly preparing to ask courts to change the penalties of 14 men from his county who are waiting for that ultimate sentence to be carried out."
That's according toLos Angeles Times columnist Anita Chabria, who exclusively reported on the California prosecutor's efforts, inspired by learning about how the death penalty connects to the country's long history of killing and oppressing people of color.
As Chabria wrote:
In most cases, he wants the court to re-sentence these men (Santa Clara has no women on death row) to serve life without parole. But in a few separate cases, already completed last year, he has requested that they be given the chance of freedom.
Why? An inherent racism in our justice system handed down from slavery to mass incarceration and capital punishment, he cites as a main reason.
"[W]e are not confident that these sentences were attained without racial bias," his office wrote in a motion to courts expected to be filed in coming days in multiple cases. "We cannot defend these sentences, and we believe that implicit bias and structural racism played some role in the death sentence."
"Rosen's unprecedented move (he is the only prosecutor in California to have made such a blanket request, and the only one I could find nationwide) has gone largely unnoticed. But it represents a new battleground in the fight over the death penalty," she asserted. "While many prosecutors around the state and the nation have stopped the use of the death penalty moving forward, Rosen is the first to look back and answer the question—with collective action—If it isn’t fair now, how could it have been fair then? "
The Santa Clara County district attorney previously pursued capital punishment in four cases—including one in which the jury ultimately found the man innocent in June 2020. A month later, Rosen announced he would no longer seek death sentences.
In a 2021 piece for The Appealarguing that Rosen should not be California's next attorney general, retired deputy public defender Michael Ogul wrote that "as someone who witnessed Rosen's attempt to execute an innocent man firsthand, his policy change is nothing more than a brazen attempt to selfishly further his political ambitions."
Rosen has said he changed his position on capital punishment after trips to the
Legacy Sites, a museum, memorial, and sculpture park in Alabama that "invite visitors to reckon with our history of racial injustice in places where that history was lived." They were created by the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal group that represents clients sentenced to death and condemned to die in prison.
"We cannot ignore that the death penalty's roots stretch back to slavery and the lynchings that continued long after the Emancipation Proclamation," Equal Justice USA CEO Jamila Hodge said in a statement Thursday, welcoming Rosen's new resentencing effort. "As lynchings diminished, executions surged. Every time we end the death penalty or stop executions, we chip away at centuries of racial injustice."
The Ella Baker Center also celebrated the development, saying: "The death penalty is rooted in a legacy of racism—from the execution of enslaved people, to the terror and lynching of Black people, to the criminal legal system of executions we have today. We must end it."
Elisabeth Semel, director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times columnist that Rosen's "highly significant" move could push other prosecutors to reconsider capital punishment, rather than just reviewing specific cases.
"There is nothing, nothing that these cases have more in common than racial discrimination, whether we are talking about privileging white victims, meaning seeking the death penalty in white crime, or disadvantaging Black clients," Semel said.
In California, over a third of death row inmates are Black and a quarter are Latinx. None of them face imminent executions, thanks to a statewide moratorium imposed in 2019 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat reelected in 2022 after a failed recall attempt.
Rosen's initiative notably comes while "California is sliding back toward a tough-on-crime attitude, driven largely by an increase in organized retail [theft] and the fentanyl crisis," as Chabria pointed out Thursday in a separate Times piece about Newsom.
The governor—who "dismantled the death chamber and promised to do away with death row as a segregated (and expensive) cellblock," as Chabria detailed—is barred from running for a third term and considered a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
Democratic President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection in November, campaigned on ending the death penalty at the federal level, but that lacks the support it would need to pass the divided Congress. He endured intense criticism in January over the U.S. Department of Justice pursuing the death penalty for a mass shooter serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The presumptive Republican nominee is former President Donald Trump, whose first term featured a "killing spree" in which the federal government executed 13 death row inmates. During a Tuesday campaign rally, Trump said that if elected, "I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk ensuring that anyone who murders a police officer will receive immediately the death penalty."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular